


Lay Me Down to Sleep

by AKA_47



Series: Drowning Inside Our Hearts [2]
Category: The Newsroom (US TV)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-09
Updated: 2014-12-09
Packaged: 2018-02-28 17:49:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,005
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2741531
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AKA_47/pseuds/AKA_47
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Grief spoke its own language and those who were stuck in it were all faced with the same uncertainties, the same doubts and questions. It wasn’t a fluid language. People muddled through it with broken sentences and half formed thoughts, spoken in sob and breath and the screaming of the soul."<br/>Sequel to Out of the Skin into the Soul</p>
            </blockquote>





	Lay Me Down to Sleep

**Author's Note:**

> I guess I wasn't quite done with these poor characters dealing with Mac's death. I think I am now though. Maybe Mac will get to live in the next one and Will can be a little happier. Sloan played a much bigger part in both stories than I had originally intended, but I kept thinking about how hard it must be to lose your best friend (for both of them), and this is what happened.

_Now I lay me down to sleep_

_I pray the Lord my soul to keep_

_See me safely through the night_

_And wake me with the morning light_

Will remembered his mom whispering the words to him and his sisters at night: the softer version, to provide some comfort to the children who heard nothing but swearing and crying and the beating of fists against skin. It was one of her small mercies, like bedtime kisses and hugs to soothe tears when she was sure their father wasn’t looking.

Will was sure that Mac had grown up with the real version of the prayer. _If I should die before I wake._ Mac, who had all the love in the world wouldn’t have needed a shield against the truth. She would have prayed that the Lord would take her soul if she were to die in the night. It was all Will could think as he stared at the TV, at NBC’s coverage of the shooting. There was a video of course, because “journalist” paparazzi had thought nothing of exploiting a tragedy for the sake of making extra money.

ACN hadn’t played it, though Elliot had mentioned its existence. Brian Williams however, seemed to have no qualms besides the obligatory statement that the footage was graphic. And damn it if Will didn’t think for just a fleeting second that Brian Williams was sure as fuck not going to be in the wedding now, no matter if Mac thought he was cute or not. A wedding that was impossible. Will knew that, logically. He was in the middle of watching Mackenzie die in front of his apartment. He wasn’t crazy. But it still didn’t feel real.

On the video, Sloan made a sound somewhere between a sob and a scream. She kept trying to talk to Mac, but her voice was overtaken by tears and it was no wonder that Mac had felt the need to comfort her. And then her eyes closed. Will had seen it so many times that the image was burned into his retina, watched it over and over. _Now I lay me down to sleep._ Will closed his own eyes, rubbing the heel of his palm hard against them until he saw spots.

“What the fuck, Will?”

He couldn’t even bring himself to care as Sloan came storming into the room (why in the world had Mac given her a key?), overturning a paint bucket in her haste to switch off the TV. Her blood covered doppelganger vanished, and the real Sloan glared at him.

“You don’t want to see that!” She shook her head. “How many times have you watched it?”

Will went back to kneading his eyelids. “A few.” His voice was muffled through his hands.

“Shit.” Sloan bent to right the paint bucket she’d knocked over and sat down heavily on it. “I should have known you were doing something self-destructive. You’ve been handling this too well.”

He looked askance at her. He almost told her then, that sometimes he pretended. Sometimes he woke up and pushed away reality, pushed away the lingering sadness of dreams he could never quite remember, but felt strongly like yearning. He almost told her that there were days when he would let himself hope ( _believe)_ that he would walk past Mac’s office and she would be there speed reading the paper, and that she would smile at him. Not all the time. Most often he woke up knowing that she was gone, feeling as though he didn’t sleep at all, filled with the kind of exhaustion that only grief can provoke, the kind that settles deep down like a second skin.

He almost told Sloan that he lived for the days he allowed himself to pretend, but she was looking at him like he was wounded, and only Mac was allowed to do that (because she had always known how to fix it, how to love the scars of his past, and mend them without pity).

“How should I be handling it, Sloan?” He asked instead. He knew that she wasn’t handling it, that she spent more days cocooned in Don’s office than she did in her own. He noticed that she didn’t fight for anything anymore, not even as Pruitt twisted and perverted everything they had all worked for.

“I don’t know.” She admitted in a breath.

“I do my job, don’t I?” Will went to work on autopilot. He talked to the staff. He tried to convince them (and himself. Mostly himself) that everything was normal. He spent a lot of time with Sloan, trying to wipe the ever present little frown off of her face because she was too damn young for the nightmares and the guilt of losing her best friend. He listened to Jim every night during the broadcast because he knew that Jim got through it by pretending too. Will could hear the trepidation in his voice as he spoke from the control room, picking his words carefully to be sure that they were Mac’s words. It was still Mac’s show for him, and Will harbored the sneaking suspicion that somewhere in the back of his mind the kid thought that Mac would walk into the control room one day, congratulate him for a job well done, and demand the headset back.

“Why?” Sloan’s question took him aback and he raised his eyebrows at her.

“Why do I do my job?”

Sloan nodded. “Pruitt’s got every inch of space that’s not taken up by the anchor desk taken over by Instagram photos and tweets. Why do you bother?”

Will knew the answer to that and he suspected that Sloan did too. It was so he wouldn’t have to think about it, so that he could fill his head with wars and scandals and senate races. Because if he thought about that stuff he could lock away the truth of his life for a few hours. It was another way to pretend.

“There isn’t a calendar,” he said by way of answer. Sloan perched her chin in her cupped hands and leaned forward, not quite touching. She hadn’t hugged him since the funeral. It was an unspoken agreement between the two of them. Sloan didn’t dare break the careful mask that Will had cultivated. “Even though I didn’t know when exactly I would get out of prison, there was always going to be an end date, a day when it would be over and I would get to be with her. There isn’t an end date now.” Will swallowed hard, pointedly turning from the tears that slid down Sloan’s cheeks.

Will wasn’t sure if that answered her question, wasn’t sure if it answered his own; _what do I do now?_

“Sometimes I wonder when it will stop. The pain.” Sloan admitted. Will was surprised by how clear her voice sounded, so used to the sadness that she had learned to speak around it. Will sighed. He wondered that too.

It was as though grief spoke its own language and that those who were stuck in it were all faced with the same uncertainties, the same doubts and questions. It wasn’t a fluid language. People muddled through it with broken sentences and half formed thoughts, spoken in sob and breath and the screaming of the soul.

“You and Don are okay?” Will asked because he loathed this language and was scrabbling to feel human again.

Sloan rolled her eyes. “Fine. We go to counseling so he can learn how to deal with me.”

“He needed that before the shooting,” he joked, smiling at her.

She smacked his arm, biting down her own smile. “He’s probably flipping out. I didn’t tell him where I was going.”

Another side effect of tragedy, you hold on to the people you love, you try to protect, to fix, to solve, and Don hadn’t learned that he couldn’t solve this yet. _Mac was shot right outside this apartment._ Don must have known that, must have worried about his new fragile girlfriend. Sloan stood up, and this time she didn’t hide her apologetic smile. She was always sorry to leave him alone. Here they were, the two broken survivors trying to hold each other up.

“He’ll guess,” Will said kindly.

“Don’t watch that shit again.” Sloan pointed an accusatory finger at the TV, “Or so help me I will come here and break your jaw.” Her eyes flashed as if she would appreciate the challenge. “You know I can.”

“Alright Rocky.” Will waved her away. He listened as the apartment door closed, leaving a deafening silence in its wake. He stared out the window at the glittering New York skyline before he turned the TV back on, pausing for just a minute before he deleted the NBC coverage from his DVR.

 _It’s time to stop punishing yourself, Billy,_ he could almost hear her say. _You didn’t do anything wrong._

But Will had spent his life cultivating guilt. He had it down to a science. Born of years of forcing himself to be a scapegoat ( _hit me instead. Hate me instead),_ he knew how to take the blame. If he had fought harder to keep them from pursuing the story, if he had given up the source to the grand jury, there wouldn’t have been a vigilantly bent on his version of justice. Mac would be alive and she would fucking resent him for giving up journalistic integrity for the sake of comfort, pester him about it for months. She would have been insufferable. _You know, Billy, I’ve always defended you when they call you an elitist, but honestly, why would you take the name of the source if you knew you couldn’t handle a few days in jail?_ And she would have meant it…sort of, but she also would have smiled as she said it and gone home with him at night, happy that they were both safe and home. He could play out that scenario in his head so well that Will could almost convince himself that it was the truth.

He had spent the majority of his life without Mackenzie, and it should have been easy to fall into the routine of being without her again. He had done it well enough the first time, except now she wasn’t just miles away, she was _dead,_ and it seemed almost impossible to go a single step in any direction without her. He wanted to stay rooted, not go forward, no change, nothing to build in place of Mac, live his life exactly as it had been when she was alive. It was the strange irrational part of him again that wanted her to be able to walk right back into his life, no disruptions.

Will turned on the stereo and made his way to the bedroom, opening the door a crack to peer inside. Mac’s pajamas were bunched on the bed, her shoes kicked lazily on the floor. Her coat hung next to his. It wasn’t much. They hadn’t gotten to build a home yet; only fragments, stray pieces to be grasped at. But the room still smelled like her, her perfume and that indefinable scent that was unique to a person, that only those who loved them ever really got to know. He kept the room mostly closed. He was afraid that if he left it open he would lose what was left of her. He knew that one day he would have to finish the apartment, that he would pack up her clothes and the room would smell like fresh paint, but not tonight.

Tonight he made his way to the air mattress in the living room, and he blasted Van Morrison to cut the silence, and as he closed his eyes for another restless night he couldn’t help but think, _see me safely through the night and wake me with the morning light_ and he was not at all sure whether he was praying to God or talking to Mac.


End file.
